columnists

Biography

John MacKinnon has been playing the keyboard for fun and profit since 1981, and since January 1999 at the Journal.

He is a 1985 graduate of Concordia University in Montreal, which, if you do the math, means he officially graduated five years after he left the full-time university life behind to perch in press boxes around the sporting world.

MacKinnon also holds a Masters degree in media administration, which he obtained from Syracuse University in 1986 during a 12-month sabbatical from the Canadian Press in Montreal, where he worked, off and on, for nine years.

In sum, having devoted the decade of the 1970s to a seemingly casual perusal of a wide variety of academic study we'll charitably collect under the label of the Liberal Arts, he hung up not one, but two diplomas in rapid succession. He might have completed college in regulation time but he got side-tracked by working obsessively for three years at the student newspaper and doing some part-time work at CP on the side.

The wire-service regimen -- batting out football and hockey summaries as well as baseball box scores, and filing stories for morning and afternoon editions -- helped prepare him for the modern internet reality at the Journal. If possible, always be typing something -- a blog item; a web hit; a revised version of an already-filed story. Something.
Which is far less onerous and way more fun than it might sound.

Throughout his career, and especially at the Journal, MacKinnon has tried to live up to the old school newspaper motto: Join the Georgian and see the world!.

Which is far less onerous and way more fun than it might sound.

Throughout his career, and especially at the Journal, MacKinnon has tried to live up to the old school newspaper motto: Join the Georgian and see the world!

That approach has taken MacKinnon from Montreal to Ottawa, where he worked for the Citizen from 1988-94, and on to Edmonton. Oh, on the way to Alberta's capital, he stopped off in Calgary for a two-year hitch at Hockey Canada.

Assignments have included five Olympics -- Sarajevo, Nagano, Sydney, Salt Lake City and Beijing; the 2006 Commonwealth Games in Melbourne, Australia; the 2007 Pan American Games in Rio de Janeiro; a cluster of Grey Cups, beginning in 1981; frequent Stanley Cup coverage, the first stint in 1983; the U.S. Open golf championship; men's and women's tennis; World Cup skiing and ski jumping; various men's, women's and junior men's world hockey championships; and much else.

Hired by the Journal as sports editor in January '99, MacKinnon has written a sports column for the paper since October 2003.

It's a wide-ranging column that, were it a boarding house, would welcome many and varied guests from around the world of sports.

So, how many members of Canada’s 63-person team will migrate from the Panamerican Junior Track and Field Championships to the national radar screen in the next year, or five years, or eight? It’s a tantalizing question since Canada’s national senior track team, notably 20-year-old sprint phenom Andre De Grasse, has grabbed popular attention this year. So, when will the up-and-comers be ready for prime time?

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lt is one of the most haunting photos in the Edmonton Journal archives: a picture of Thomas Svekla, dressed in a green camouflage jacket and tinted round sunglasses, smiling tauntingly at the camera, his finger held to his lips. “Shhhh,” he seems to be saying. “I’ve got a secret.”